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In reply to one of my Browser Market Share postings,
Ian Brown wrote to point out that with an
increasing portion of the traffic going through newsreaders, it might be
interesting to do some breakdown on that.
So I did.
[Updated to say the results should be taken with a large grain of salt.]

Here is a list of the top 100 different agents who fetched the
ongoing RSS feed in the week ending March 20th.
Note that the number for Bloglines is the product of the number of fetches
and the number of subscribers.
After the numbers, I’ve included the quickie Perl script that generated
them.

Comments on whether the right thing is being measured, whether it’s being
measured accurately, whether a regular report would be welcome, and ideas on
graphics when there are dozens as opposed to just a handful of interesting
players, would all be welcome. Later: I got lots. Thus...

The Problem ·
The problem is, as Scott Henry and
Dave Sifry both pointed out,
Bloglines is running 24/7 and fetching the feed whether or not anyone is
looking; whereas the desktop aggregators mostly run only when the user is
sitting in front of them. Scott also observed that if there any
inactive Bloglines subscribers, they’ll still show up in the subscription
count.

Dave had some good ideas how you might correct for this, and I’m kicking
some others around too.
Having said that, I do think that in the case of
ongoing, NetNewsWire and Bloglines are the big dogs.

Thanks to
Joseph Lindsay who pointed to four
similar pieces from Richard McManus based on Feedburner stats:
1,
2,
3,
4.
Elliott Hughes suggested
computing percentages and doing a graph cut off at 5%. Wow, good idea; but
for the moment I
think 1% would be the place to cut.